The US will fight both the Islamic State and Bashar al-Assad

US President Barack Obama is reviewing his Syria policy due to the need to intensify the fight against the Islamic State. CNN reported this with reference to sources in the White House. According to her, the presidential administration intends to solve the dual task of fighting the Islamic State and changing the regime in Damascus. The US Embassy in Moscow clarified to Kommersant that there is no talk of a radical change in US policy, and pressure on the Syrian regime has not been taken off the agenda before. However, experts interviewed by Kommersant are skeptical about the idea of overthrowing Bashar Assad: the moderate Syrian opposition, on which the West relied, has been practically destroyed, and the scenario of a ground operation is not being considered.

The Barack Obama administration was forced to reconsider its Syrian policy due to problems that arose during the fight against the Islamic State group operating in Iraq and Syria. According to CNN's diplomatic sources, over the past week, four meetings on Syria were held in the White House one after another, one of which was chaired personally by Barack Obama.

“Americans are not at all interested in Bashar Assad”

The task of overthrowing Bashar al-Assad was set by Washington long before the Islamic State challenged the United States and the West this year. At a time when IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi declared his goal to create a “global caliphate,” the fight against the group has become a new priority for the United States and its allies.

At the same time, the implementation of the project of “democratic reconstruction” of Syria has reached a dead end: President Assad managed to maintain control over a significant part of the country and confirmed his legitimacy during the presidential elections in June. The units of the moderate opposition, on which the West initially relied, were defeated by the Islamists, and the international coalition of the so-called “Friends of Syria”, whose goal is to change the regime in Damascus, began to meet less and less often, having lost its guidelines and understanding of how to proceed. Turkey adhered to the most consistent and irreconcilable line towards Bashar al-Assad, but the task of regime change in Damascus turned out to be beyond Ankara’s strength.

How the US hit IS leaders

In this situation, Washington, it seems, decided to remind that the task of “democratizing Syria,” despite the threat from the Islamic State, is not removed from the agenda. At the same time, as American diplomats clarify, it is more appropriate to talk not about a turn in Syrian policy, as CNN reported, but about its fine tuning. “The strategy has not changed: while driving ISIS out of Iraq remains our first priority, we and our coalition partners continue to strike the Islamic State in Syria to prevent it from feeling secure and to destroy its fighting power,” he said. "Kommersant" Press Secretary of the US Embassy in Moscow William Stevens: Assad remains the biggest magnet for extremism in Syria, and President Obama has made it clear that this man has lost legitimacy. Therefore, along with efforts to isolate the Assad regime, we are working with our allies in the country. in order to strengthen the moderate opposition."

However, experts interviewed by Kommersant are skeptical about the US attempt to update the idea of overthrowing Bashar Assad, combining it with the task of fighting the Islamic State. “The moment to overthrow Assad has clearly been missed, and the White House today hardly has a clear idea of who and how can achieve this goal,” Vladimir Sotnikov, a senior researcher at the Center for International Security at IMEMO RAS, told Kommersant. According to the expert, adjusting the Syrian strategy has political significance for President Obama, both domestically and abroad. “This is rather an attempt to save face both before the Republicans in Congress and before the part of the US-led coalition that is most irreconcilable towards Assad,” the expert explained to Kommersant.

Sergei Strokan, Elena Chernenko

President Obama has opened two Syrian fronts